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In March 1940 a novel about a 20-year-old Black chauffeur in Chicago who kills his employer’s daughter sold about 250,000 copies in three weeks. Native Son was the first book by an African American author chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and it made Richard Wright, born in 1908 on a plantation in Mississippi, the best-known Black writer in America. Five years later Black Boy told the story of the childhood behind it. In 1946 he moved to Paris, where he wrote novels, travel books and, at the end, haiku, until his death in 1960 at the age of 52. Parts of his work were cut before publication and only appeared in full decades later; one novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, was first published in 2021. This guide covers his 12 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 key books · 1938–2021 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Richard Wright published eleven books in his lifetime and seven more appeared after his death. The best known are Native Son (1940), his novel of Bigger Thomas in Chicago, and Black Boy (1945), his memoir of growing up in the South. Start with Black Boy, then read Native Son; below you will find all 12 key books in order, the restored texts, and the books he wrote in Paris.
Where to Start with Richard Wright
If you want his life in his own words
→ Black Boy (1945) — read in the full 1991 text if you can.
If you want his defining novel
→ Native Son (1940) — the 1940 book that made his name.
If you want his short fiction
→ Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) — the stories of the Jim Crow South that came first.
If you want the book that waited eighty years
→ The Man Who Lived Underground (2021).
12 Richard Wright Books, in Order
Uncle Tom’s Children
His first book: four novellas of Black life and white violence in the Jim Crow South, from a lynching to a flood to a march of hungry people. One of them, “Fire and Cloud”, won a 500-dollar Story magazine prize in 1938. The 1940 edition added the story “Bright and Morning Star” and the autobiographical essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”.
Native Son
Bigger Thomas, 20 and poor on Chicago’s South Side, becomes chauffeur to the wealthy Dalton family. One night he accidentally suffocates their daughter Mary to stop her blind mother finding him in her room, burns the body, and later kills his girlfriend Bessie. His Communist lawyer, Boris Max, does not argue he is innocent but blames the society that made him. Published on 1 March 1940, it sold about 250,000 copies in three weeks; scenes cut at the Book-of-the-Month Club’s request were restored in 1991.
12 Million Black Voices
A short folk history of Black America, from the slave ships through sharecropping in the South to the tenements of the northern cities, told in the first person plural. Wright’s text runs alongside Depression-era photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam.
Black Boy
Wright’s childhood in Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee: poverty, hunger, a fractured family and the daily rules of Jim Crow, from the four-year-old who sets fire to his grandmother’s house to the 17-year-old who leaves for Memphis and then Chicago. The Book-of-the-Month Club took only the Southern part, so the Chicago chapters were dropped. The first edition sold 195,000 copies in shops and 351,000 through the club; the full text appeared in 1991 as Black Boy (American Hunger).
The Outsider
His first novel written in Paris. Cross Damon, a Chicago postal worker trapped by debts and family, is reported dead after a subway crash, takes a new identity and goes to New York, where he becomes caught up with Communist Party members and commits several murders. It is his most openly philosophical book, written after years among the French existentialists.
Black Power
An account of his journey in 1953 to the Gold Coast, the British colony that became Ghana, as Kwame Nkrumah’s movement was moving towards independence. Wright writes candidly about his own distance, as an African American, from the people and customs he meets.
The Color Curtain
His report from the 1955 conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where leaders of newly independent nations in Asia and Africa met. Wright reads the meeting as a turn in world politics around race and religion, as much as around the Cold War.
The Long Dream
The last novel published in his lifetime and a return to the South he had left. Rex “Fishbelly” Tucker grows up in a Mississippi town as the son of a Black undertaker whose wealth depends on bribes paid to the white police, and learns what that bargain costs.
Eight Men
Stories and radio plays about eight Black men, assembled before his death and published in 1961. It includes “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”, about a farm boy who buys a gun, and the shortened story version of “The Man Who Lived Underground”.
Lawd Today!
His first novel, written around 1935 under the title Cesspool and published only after his death. It follows Jake Jackson, a Chicago postal worker, through a single day of quarrels with his wife, card games, work and drinking.
American Hunger
The six Chicago chapters cut from Black Boy in 1945, published together by Harper & Row. They cover his menial jobs, the John Reed Club, his years in the Communist Party, and why he broke with it. Since 1991 they are also printed as the second half of Black Boy (American Hunger).
The Man Who Lived Underground
Fred Daniels, a Black man, is beaten by the police into confessing falsely to the murder of a white couple, escapes, and hides in the city’s sewers. Harper & Brothers rejected the novel in 1941, and only a shortened story, without the police-station opening, was published in the 1940s. The Library of America published the full text in 2021, with an afterword by his grandson Malcolm Wright.
In What Order to Read Richard Wright
Nothing in Wright is a series, but the order of writing matters more than the order of publication. Lawd Today! (1963) was written before Native Son, The Man Who Lived Underground (2021) just after it, and American Hunger (1977) is the second half of Black Boy. If you can, read the 1991 Library of America texts of Native Son and Black Boy (American Hunger), which restore what was cut.
Read the American books first: the stories, Native Son and Black Boy. The Paris books, from The Outsider to the travel writing, make more sense once you know the South and Chicago he was writing away from.
A reading path
1. Black Boy (American Hunger) (1945/1991)
2. Native Son (1940)
3. Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)
4. The Man Who Lived Underground (2021)
5. The Outsider (1953)
Everything Else Richard Wright Published
Beyond the 12 key books: 6 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other books published in his lifetime
3
3 books · 1954–1957
- 1954Savage Holidaya novel with a white protagonist, first published as a paperback original
- 1957Pagan Spaintravel writing from Franco’s Spain
- 1957White Man, Listen!lectures on race, colonialism and the West
Published after his death
3
3 books · 1994–2008
- 1994Rite of Passagea novella about a Harlem teenager
- 1998Haiku: This Other Worldhaiku from his last years in France
- 2008A Father’s Lawan unfinished last novel
The years · 1908–1960
Quick facts about Richard Wright
- Known for
- Richard Wright is known for writing about Black American life under Jim Crow and in the northern cities with an anger and directness no Black novelist had brought to a bestseller before.
- 1908
- Born near Roxie, Mississippi
- 1927
- Leaves the South for Chicago
- 1940
- Native Son
- 1946
- Moves to Paris
- 1960
- Dies in Paris, aged 52
- Born
- 4 September 1908, on Rucker’s Plantation between Roxie and Natchez, Mississippi
- Grew up
- Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee; left Jackson at 17 for Memphis, then Chicago
- Politics
- Joined the Communist Party in the 1930s; left in 1942 and announced it in 1944
- Honours
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1939); NAACP Spingarn Medal (1941)
- Paris
- Moved in 1946 and became a French citizen in 1947
- Family
- Married Ellen Poplar in 1941; daughters Julia (1942) and Rachel (1949)
- Died
- 28 November 1960, Paris, of heart failure; buried at Père Lachaise
The red mark is 1940: Native Son, the novel that made him the best-known Black writer in America.
How Richard Wright Writes: Fear, Flight and Fate
Wright builds his fiction on the structure his own life taught him: fear, flight, and a fate the character cannot escape. Native Son is divided into three books with exactly those titles, “Fear”, “Flight” and “Fate”, and the pattern returns in The Man Who Lived Underground, The Outsider and The Long Dream: a Black man under pressure, a violent act, a pursuit.
He refused to make his main character easy to like. After Uncle Tom’s Children, he said in his essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (1940), he realised he had written a book that bankers’ daughters could read and weep over, and he wanted the next one to be too hard for tears. That choice is also why Native Son divided readers: James Baldwin, his younger friend, called it protest fiction in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), and their friendship ended.
In his nonfiction the same directness turns on himself. Black Boy is a memoir of hunger, of food and of books, and its Chicago half is an account of why he left the Communist Party. In Paris he wrote as an outsider in Africa, Asia and Spain, always asking what a writer of his background could and could not see.
Frequently asked questions about Richard Wright’s books
How many books has Richard Wright written?
Eighteen in all: eleven published in his lifetime, from Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) to The Long Dream (1958), and seven after his death, the most recent The Man Who Lived Underground (2021). Twelve are the key books on this page; the other six are listed under Everything Else.
What are Richard Wright’s books in order?
Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Native Son (1940), 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Black Boy (1945), The Outsider (1953), Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), The Long Dream (1958), Eight Men (1961), Lawd Today! (1963), American Hunger (1977) and The Man Who Lived Underground (2021).
Where should I start with Richard Wright?
With Black Boy, his memoir of growing up in the South, ideally in the full 1991 text Black Boy (American Hunger). Then read Native Son, which shows the Chicago world the memoir ends in through fiction.
What is Richard Wright’s most famous book?
Native Son (1940). It was the first book by an African American author chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club and sold about 250,000 copies in three weeks. Black Boy (1945) is close behind and is widely taught in schools.
Has Native Son been adapted?
Several times. Wright and Paul Green adapted it for Broadway in 1941, with Orson Welles directing and Canada Lee as Bigger. In a 1951 film made in Argentina, Wright, then 42, played Bigger himself. A second film followed in 1986, and HBO released a third, directed by Rashid Johnson with Ashton Sanders as Bigger, in April 2019.
Why were Black Boy and Native Son cut?
Both were changed for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Sexual scenes were removed from Native Son, and only the Southern half of Black Boy was published, so the chapters on Chicago and the Communist Party were dropped. They appeared as American Hunger in 1977, and the Library of America published both books in full in 1991.
Why has Black Boy been banned?
Both Black Boy and Native Son have been challenged in American schools and libraries for sexual content, violence, profanity and racial language. In 1945 Senator Theodore Bilbo denounced Black Boy as obscene in the Senate, and it was one of the books removed by a New York school board in the case that reached the US Supreme Court as Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982). The American Library Association lists both among the most challenged books of recent decades.
Was Richard Wright a Communist?
Yes, for about a decade. He joined the Communist Party in Chicago in the 1930s, through the John Reed Club, and wrote for its publications. He left in 1942 and announced his break in 1944; the story is told in American Hunger and in his essay for The God That Failed (1949).
When and how did Richard Wright die?
On 28 November 1960 in Paris, aged 52, of sudden heart failure during a stay at a clinic. He is buried at Père Lachaise cemetery. His daughter Julia and his friend Ollie Harrington later questioned the circumstances of his death.
What was the dispute between Richard Wright and James Baldwin?
Baldwin, who had been helped by Wright early on, criticised Native Son in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and later essays, arguing that Bigger Thomas was a type rather than a full human being. The friendship ended in acrimony.
Footnotes
- Richard Wright (author) — Wikipedia
- Native Son — Wikipedia
- Black Boy — Wikipedia
- Unearthing ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’ — Harvard Gazette, 2021
- Richard Wright’s daughter on The Man Who Lived Underground — CBS News, 2021
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.”
— Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger), from the closing passage
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